Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Bush Team Is Campaigning for Opposition to Mugabe's Rule [New York Times: International News] Two words: Regime Change. Or as we used to call it, overthrowing someone else's government. That regime change we endorsed and CIA helped out with in Chile, 1972, worked out real well, didn't it? For us, I mean - it obviously didn't work out well for Chile or anything.
11:35:34 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to do when I've filled the 10 meg provided on the Salon community server. I've pruned a few unused graphics. It's hard to believe I've upstreamed that much text! Also, after publishing a copy of this site to my own host and then switching off the FTP service, my local server's home page still shows the site's home page as http://memewatch.com/blogistan/ so now I wonder how I get it to switch that back. This may mean I have trouble posting today if I hit that max size limit again. I'm looking into it. Any experience or suggestions welcome. [Christian Crumlish (xian): salonika] This is a serious concern - 10 mb isn't that much at all. Does anyone know what the size limit on weblogs.com is? Scott Rosenberg, if you happen to read this, could we *please* get some more space? I gave you a bunch of money and I'll give you more, if needed. =)

9:30:37 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

A co-worker of mine put forward a theory for the Taliban + Beaker search - they were actually looking for that Bert and bin Laden poster. It's possible. =)
9:23:19 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Music Companies Target Chinese Web Site [New York Times: Technology] According to the AP in the article above, Listen4Ever is still alive - it's just swamped with traffic. To my non-surprise, the lawsuit against AT&T Broadband, Cable and Wireless, Sprint, and UUNet that the RIAA filed has succeeded in introducing a significant number of people to listen4ever.com - people who had not already heard of it...myself included. I was wondering why they were targetting just those four companies - sure, they control a lot of the backbone (back when I was doing customer service for an ISP outside of Boston, '96-'97, some guy with a backhoe accidently tore a UUNet cable in New Jersey...turned out, that was UUNet's backbone from Virginia to New York and Boston. Something like 75% of all net usage in NY/Boston went over that pipe. Wow, did we get a lot of calls that day...) but there are plenty of other providers...AOL, anybody? But it turns out there's a technical reason (from the article): "The four defendants have the most interchange points with other networks, according to the research firm TeleGeography Inc. -- meaning that any technical blocking by them of specific Web addresses would affect many Internet users regardless of their service provider. ``These ISPs are in a unique position to cut off access to Listen4ever at the Internet entry point into the United States,'' the Recording Industry Association of America said." Huh. I don't expect RIAA to win the suit - too vague. But it has succeeded in their goal: Listen4Ever's site is so swamped with traffic that you can't load a thing.

3:12:15 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

OK - mild annoyance I'm having with my divs on this page...there's three div blocks, or whatever you call them - the title area, the blog area, and the sidebar area. On Netscape 6 and Opera, the left margin of the blog area lines up with the left margin of the title area, and the right margin of the sidebar lines up with the right margin of the title area. On IE6, there is a slight (but noticable) indentation on the left side of the blog area, and another on the right side of the sidebar area. The left/right margins are not flush, as they are in NS6. Anyone have any idea why that is? I've played with margin settings in the CSS style declarations, but it hasn't changed anything...

1:13:04 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Cadbury's advert upsets India. Media: Confectionary giant compares a brand of chocolate to the disputed territory of Kashmir, describing both as 'too good to share'. [Guardian Unlimited] No, seriously. The picture on the right was used as a newspaper ad...the red bit is Kashmir, and in there it says 'too good to share'. That's almost American in its obliviousness...
12:17:43 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

'Hostages held' at Iraqi embassy [BBC World] Because, after all, nothing says 'Democratic Opposition' quite like taking hostages...
12:14:58 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

In response to Charley Z's response to my Beaker post from a few days back: I've always been convinced that Dr. Honeydew is in fact Beaker's uncle - y'know, the one who got hit in the head real hard as a kid? Beaker's been sent by the family to watch over their crazy relation, and he's so dedicated to his family that he takes all the pain and punishment Honeydew's insane experiments can dish out - which also explains why Honeydew never actually came up with anything, y'know, that worked.

12:03:55 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

So here's my current status with development on this page: there's a problem with Netscape 6 - text seems to sometimes spill over the right side of the blog items. I need to play with this and see if I can figure out if it's solvable. I'm still trying to get the width of the blog item div to adjust the way I want. My goal is for the sidebar to take up the same width (160 pixels) no matter the size of the window/resolution, but for the blog item div to take up an increasing percentage of the total space...basically, have the sidebar, margins, etc take up the same space no matter what resolution/size, with the blog item div taking up the remainder. I don't think I'm going to be able to get that to work quite the way I want - I think that the space between the sidebar and blog items will end up increasing as size/resolution increases, though not as fast as the blog items div does. Still, this needs more work. I finally found where Radio determines what to put in the editor box when you post something from the news aggregator (for those of you who might be curious, jump to system.verbs.builtin.radio.macros.weblogPostForm and look for idStory). I wanted to see if I could tweak that behavior, but it looks hard-coded for now. That actually plays into my last problem/issue/whatever...I'm using a div id called #indent on my blog items div now. It redefines <p> to have the style { text-indent: 30px; }. I like this - automatic indentation. But I don't want to indent posts from my news aggregator - this means, currently, that I have to go to the source, close the div, and then reopen the <div id="indent"> after the news item. I'm actually doing the same with this post - I don't see a point in indenting the opening line here. I think I'm stuck with this, but I might be able to cook something up...

11:09:32 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

I was right - there were problems with the background image and resolutions over 1024x768. I fixed it - it now repeats the image as needed. I'm going to see if I can find a way to stretch/shrink the image depending on resolution next...that'd just be too damned cool. =)
8:19:20 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Argh - my roommate just spent the last five minutes whistling a few lines from a Black 47 song, one of the ballads off the first album. I can't remember any of the words - neither can he - but now the fiddle bridge won't get OUT OF MY HEAD. On that note - off to work.
7:24:48 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Zero Hour in Zimbabwe [Washington Post: Editorial] Zimbabwe is a difficult situation for Americans to understand. When presented with a foreign affairs story like that of the white farmers in Zimbabwe, we naturally try to determine who's right, and who's wrong...who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. At first glance, Zimbabwe seems to provide us with a natural villain in Mugabe, along with what could be seen as reverse racism in the black majority's unpleasant treatment of its white minority. There's little question that Mugabe is not a Good Person...even putting aside the current claims that his supporters are being allotted food during the current famine at the expense of his opponents, we're talking about a man who throttled the domestic and international press and rigged his re-election so blatantly that even his allies condemned him. But Zimbabwe isn't that simple... What many white Americans will forget is that Zimbabwe has only been Zimbabwe for a little over twenty years. Before then, it was Rhodesia, South Africa's ideological partner in apartheid. Rhodesia's white government fell to Mugabe's guerillas after the (non-South African) Western world turned its collective back on them. Mugabe has held power ever since - and has been legitimately elected, prior to last year's farce. I heard a supporter of Mugabe's on the BBC last night, and he brought up a point that makes the Good v. Evil split a lot fuzzier - the white farmers never 'bought' their land in the first place. They just grabbed it from the native people, whom they more or less enslaved. Do the current generation of landowners have a right to keep profitting from the atrocities their ancestors committed? When we do hear coverage of this issue in the States, we typically hear of a benevolent white farmer, whose family has worked the land for generations and who treated their employees with dignity and generosity. I even remember one being interviewed and talking about how he provided shelter and supplies for Mugabe's revolutionaries. It is true that the worst of the racists left Zimbabwe after their government fell, but does anyone actually believe that even a majority of the remaining are truly fair and non-racist? Don't forget the famine throughout southern Africa. As long as the ownership and operation of farms is up in the air, no one's growing anything - and that food is desperately needed. In the end, it comes down to one question. Who has the rights to the land - those who now own it in a Western sense and who have invested generations into its upkeep and improvement, or the original residents who had it stolen from them in the first place and still remain orders of magnitude poorer than their white bosses?

6:57:55 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []